Pope Francis' long to-do list starts with Curia

RELIGION NEWS SERVICE :
March 15, 2013

VATICAN CITY — Pope Francis comes into office riding a wave of good will but facing a host of challenges both inside and outside the Catholic Church.

Whether he can tackle them, however, may depend on his ability to tame the Roman Curia, the dysfunctional papal bureaucracy that was uppermost in the minds of the cardinals when they elected him this week.

Yes, electors wanted a pastoral figure after eight years of the astringent rule of Benedict XVI, and in Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio they got one. The humble Argentine Jesuit champions the poor, lives simply, cooks his meals and takes mass transit around Buenos Aires.

Yet naming yourself after St. Francis of Assisi is one thing. Running the Vatican is another.

It's not something the pope sought even back in the conclave of 2005, when he reportedly ran second to Benedict.

“In the Curia I would die,” he said in an interview after that conclave. “Without the people of my diocese, without their problems, I feel something lacking every day.”

If that sounds like hyperbole, consider that many believe the intrigue and isolation that John Paul I encountered after his 1978 election contributed to his death only 33 days later. This week the elderly mother of Austrian Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn said her son, if elected, “would not be up to the bitchiness in the Vatican.”

So how do you go about fixing the Curia?

There are a number of proposals promoted by critics, and they focus on what good government advocates usually propose: better personnel, term limits for department heads and altering management structure.

“An institution with 1.2 billion members all over the globe cannot be run by what is essentially an unreformed Renaissance monarchy and its elderly cosseted courtiers,” said the Tablet of London, a leading Catholic weekly, before the conclave.

The Vatican administration is made up of dozens of congregations, councils and commissions, as well as a bank with a troubled history, all run by (mostly Italian) bishops and cardinals. Each department acts like its own fiefdom, and curial officials are not above undermining their opponents with the kind of unseemly court intrigue that became public in the “Vatileaks” document dump that dominated the final year of Benedict's papacy.

But it is also a question of who can undertake this reform.

“There are two general views,” Boston Cardinal Sean O'Malley told reporters. “The first one maintains that, since the current church's problem comes from the Curia, we should elect someone outside the Curia.”

The cardinals delivered their answer Wednesday night when they elected Bergoglio, a man with no experience in the Curia, nor much regard for it either. He reportedly called for the Curia's reform in a brief but potent speech to the cardinals in the pre-conclave meetings.

Last year, Bergoglio criticized the preening and clericalism of the hierarchy, calling them “peacocks” displaying a “self-absorbed vanity.”

“He comes across as shy and reserved,” New York Cardinal Timothy Dolan said of the new pope, but “he's a man of confidence and poise.”

Church sources who know Francis say his archdiocese was a well-run shop, and that he has the administrative chops that his predecessor never did.

Early clues to Francis' management style as pope probably won't emerge for weeks.

By tradition, he is likely to reconfirm the heads of all the major Vatican departments who by church law had to resign when Benedict did.

But he also will begin to replace them. His choices will give a better sense of how successful he will be.